This doesn’t really mean anything for Darktide’s future.
I do wonder if a contract with microsoft’s xbox gamepass is what forced them to release Darktide in 2022 instead of delaying until 2023 though.
While Xbox releases at loss, that doesn’t mean that releasing a game on Xbox is at loss
Yeah, but spending almost a year on developing a release for the least popular platform doesn’t sound like anything good either.
What to expect from it? A new wave of players?
More like another slowing in development.
From what I understand the xbox release is relatively trivial this time around, unlike VT2 which needed special versions of the game, and is more or less just another PC from a technical perspective. Even series S should be fine as there are PCs on par with series S running DT, (I used to run DT on a PC about on par with series S before I upgraded.)
In theory, assuming Fatshark’s development speed hasn’t completely calcified, the xbox port isn’t where most of the dev time is going.
Hmm, a lot of people on this forum assumed quite the opposite.
But if not, where would you assume most of their time is actually going?
The stuff we saw in the commlink + Classes and content to come with the xbox launch probably.
Fatshark is slow, but just doing the xbox port with little else would be giga slow considering how much easier it is on paper compared to VT2.
But then I never really know with this company, maybe they have become that much slower.
FWIW, the cadence of the 4th careers released on VT2 got slower and slower with each one. Been like almost two years now waiting on sienna’s 4th career.
I think they are getting slower and slower - at least from the end users perspective.
I bet it’s just because fewer and fewer people get to work on VT2.
The question is, what is the majority working on? Back in the day, it could be a DT release on PC, now I still assume it’s an Xbox release.
Can’t be sure of anything, of course.
With player count this low, I imagine that’s exactly what they expect.
I don’t know many people with an xbox. Are xbox players out of it enough they won’t know the darktide woes? I think this is bad because the influx will repeat the whole cycle of
'this is awesome…
wait…
can you?
no?
This sucks…
bye."
That is nothing new. I remember reading an article in old gaming magazine about history of consoles and one of the identified sales strategies was creation of a market for the games by selling A LOT of consoles.
In practice it means that you do not make money by selling consoles, you make money selling games and licences.
Some older forum goers here might remember the company 3DO, which is best known for the Heroes of Might and Magic / Might and Magic game series. The company used to develop a console in early '90s which couldn’t withstand the competition as their consoles were too pricey exactly due to this reason: the company did not adopt the above sales model and tried making money with both consoles and games.
The practice is actually pretty common business model, one of the oldest examples are the famous Gilette Razor Blades. The idea-giver, King Camp Gilette quickly noticed that it’s not the safety razor handles that keep the business going but it is the disposable replacement razors. So the goal was to sell as much razor handles as possible, even to the point of mathematical loss per unit, to create a thriving market for razor blades.
So long story short: Xbox sales strategy does not spell doom for Darktide.
I can understand that it works just fine for Microsoft, but I see no argument for how it’s beneficial to Darktide.
Well, if it works for Microsoft then it works just as fine for Darktide as a game?
Or am I stuck in some wrong shoe here?
Xbox is merely a gaming platform, that FS plans to use.
The Microsoft sales strategy means loss for Microsoft, not for Fatshark and this approach guarantees more consoles on the market.
More consoles mean more potential Darktide players.
Heck, from business point of view it would even make sense to launch every possible game on Xbox and use the platform to it’s full extent. Capacity needs to be sold and if I am aware of it, then Microsoft surely is too.
Let’s also not forget the plentitude of similarities in hardware between PC and Xbox consoles, the port here is definitely easier than a port to Nintendo 
New player that would buy the game
→ Monetary gain for FS
→ New people that would buy Premium stuff
→ New people that would play with the current groups
Also note that they might have a contract and stuff, like gamepass does force that you have console too iirc
But the thing is that Xbox is already lost the “console war” and is pretty much on the VR spot.
So there won’t be “more players” than PS can give, for example.
They will 100% get a new batch of chumps. People who either didn’t pay attention to the garbage fire last year, or who think it can’t be that bad, or who cream themselves at the thought of playing a 40k FPS, or maybe even some repeat chumps who already like the abuse they’ve gotten on PC that want to repeat the process on console. It happened with Vermintide 2 and it will happen again with Darktide.
It was also probably part of the their contract with Microsoft to release the game simultaneously on PC & Xbox. But they were forced to reneg on that due to various reasons. So it would behoove them to get it out the door to appease MS.
21 milion sold units is by far not a lost war. It means a market with 21.000.000 units currently there.
Intel sells around 71% of GPUs worldwide, Nvidia 17%. Would you deem RTX to be a lost cause due to this? AMD is even further behind.
If Darktide sells to 0,5% (half percent or 1 in 200) of the Xbox owners for let’s say 39,99€ then:
21.000.000 * 0,005 = 4.198.950€ on the game alone. And I am not even taking paid cosmetics, licences or whatever else into account.
So release makes sense, one way or another.
Microsoft gives studio money to release on their platform, obviously. Money buys production time.
Well, while it might look like a lot, holding a studio with ~200 employees will take at least twice as much for a year of development.
And we’re not talking about the commission and taxes.
Let’s hope they will get enough, but right now their plan looks like “put everything on Xbox” (because it’s the only platform they confirmed being worked on, and we’re not getting any meaningful content updates).
So the goal was to sell as much razor handles as possible
It’s a bit different incase of games market. Problem is in reputational damage. Larian studios is an example how customer’s trust can bring profit. If Fatshark will announce V3, i doubt there will be a lot of things to please investors like pre-orders and add to wishlist button clicks. Incase with Fatshark they need to wait till market will forget about how DT release and support was if there will be no miracle comeback from them. There is also such factor as moral state of employees, somehow i think DRG devs doesn’t feel any frustration or pressure when they read steam subform, unlike DT devs.